Sleepless Nights
by Elena Takami
Summary: After recent events, Sokka doesn't sleep so well anymore, and although she'd never admit it, Toph's getting worried. Contains implications of rape and violence. Could be vaguely considered TophSokka. It might be updated, but don't hold your breath.
1. Night

_This is a very, very slightly altered version of the original version of this story - I needed to add some time in for the new prequel-ly scenes, that's all. It's still just an agsty, angsty scenelet with some very mild Toph/Sokka._

_This story contains fairly heavy-handed implications of rape and/or violence to a teenage boy. Please let me know if I've handled the topic in a way you feel to be unrealistic._

_Reviews and concrit appreciated (particularly the original reviewers, cause I'm not sure I get to keep those. Thanks, guys!)_

* * *

Another week later, and Sokka's louder than ever. Katara seems to think he's back to normal, but Toph is fairly sure this isn't the Sokka they lost. His plans are more enthusiastic and less well thought out, almost suicidally so. His sleeping patterns are a nightmare, and it's a rare night Toph doesn't feel him spend half the night tossing and turning, or on what seem to be the worst nights getting up and going for a walk. Even when he's not talking or trying to sleep, he's a lot jumpier. Toph can feel that, too; the way he tenses when people get too close, the constant shifting of weight, the way the first thing he does on a rest break is find something to put his back against.

Toph knows why, too; that prison. It's like no matter how had he might try to run, his mind is still locked in that tiny dark cell with no escape. They may have broken him out, but the prison broke him first. She's not entirely clueless as to what might have happened in there; for all his usual bluster, he's still only a teenage boy and as the Blind Bandit, she talked to a couple of ex-cons. Tough men, but even they blustered about their time in prison.

It seems like tonight's going to be one of the really bad nights. Sokka just got up.

But tonight, Toph's decided to see if she can make a difference, so she removes the front door of her self-made cave and glares in his general direction. She can't think of anything appropriate to say, so she just goes with the first thing she can think of, a rather harsh "Some of us are trying to sleep, meatboy." She cringes as she says it, but what else is there to say?

Sokka jumps and freezes, and by the time he's come up with an answer, Toph's stood next to him. "Well, let's go walkies then," is all she says. She's fairly sure Sokka has a hundred reasons why she shouldn't go with him, so she frowns at him again.

The walk doesn't last long, but the total silence makes it seem longer, and they end up back in camp without a word being said. Sokka's mumbling something about goodnight as he goes back to his sleeping bag. Toph decides tonight might not be a good night to start confronting him; a couple more walks first, she thinks, so she goes back to her cave.

And in silence, she worries for the loud-mouthed boy she used to know and wonders where he went.


	2. Break

_...I guess this is completely non-chronological, but I felt like writing Toph's view of the prison break. So I did._

_It's just another little scenelet. Maybe that was my plan all along. As Sokka's mind is broken, so too is the flow of the fic, or something like that. XD_

_Next up, I might actually see if I can play with Sokka's viewpoint. Maybe. If I stop feeling lazy._

* * *

Toph frowns in concentration as she rips apart another wall in this hellhole the Fire Nation calls a prison. This is the last wall; beyond it lies Sokka, her feet tell her. Katara and Aang, behind her, deal with guards as the wall comes down.

On Toph's first step into the cell, she can tell something is wrong; there's no cheerful greeting, no jokes about how he was just about to break out from Sokka. He doesn't even move; it's almost like he's asleep, but without even the small shifts and movements that would bring. If not for the heartbeat and breathing, he could be dead. Toph has never longed more for sight, nor been more grateful she cannot see, as she walks to him and kneels by his side. He feels wrong, broken somehow, and she doesn't think she wants to know how it translates.

"Hey, you. This is no time for a cosy nap," she hisses at him, but he still doesn't respond, not even to her half shouted "HEY, wake up!"

The fighting dies behind her, and Katara also enters the tiny room. "Toph? Have you got him? It's too dark in here to see," she says.

"Yeah, he's here. Hold on," Toph replies, and the floor rises up under Sokka and carries him into the hallway. She can tell when he's reached a patch of light. Katara tenses up as she sees her brother, and in that one instinctive moment the blind girl can feel horror and anger and guilt, and she feels guilty too. He hadn't wanted to go into that town, and it was pure bad luck that found a whole legion of soldiers in the town also; soldiers with their names and pictures and the offer of a reward driving them.

She loses track of Sokka, then, and she panics in the brief moment before Aang mentions, softly, that he has Sokka and they can go now.

Toph stays at the back as they leave, and as she passes she destroys as much of the building as she can. Fire Nation soldiers call for help, trapped in tiny cells of rubble, but Toph is too angry to think of it as anything but a fitting revenge. She leaves as she arrived; carried by her rage.

* * *

It takes Katara no time at all to heal Sokka up, once they stop for the night, but even then Sokka is still. His mind is somewhere else entirely, and what should have been a triumphant rescue is instead a nightmare of hopes and lurking fears. Toph doesn't sleep at all, that first night; all of the right bodies are there, but it still feels like someone is missing and the contradiction rattles her earth sense and keeps her awake.

The week goes slowly; no-one can sleep and it shows. Toph can't lose the urge to shake Sokka until he wakes up, Katara is snappy and worried, and even Aang's patience seems to be tested. Toph takes to telling Sokka that this is all his fault, in the hopes he'll snap back and tell her she can't blame him for everything.

It's both disappointing and worrying when Sokka wakes up in the middle of a diatribe and, rather than yell back, he shifts backwards into Appa and apologises, in a mumble.

This isn't Sokka, thinks Toph. This is some Water Tribe kid who feels kinda like Sokka, but isn't.

It's surprising how much the thought hurts.


	3. Dreaming

_Wow, that was a much, much longer hiatus than planned. Sorry for the wait - I really, really hope this chapter at least partially makes up for how very encouraging, enthusiastic and patient the reviewers have been. Thanks, guys - I really appreciate it._

_I was going to write this from Sokka's viewpoint, but... so far, it's all been Toph's viewpoint, and I kinda want to stick with it, maybe run a little further with Toph's headvoice. Plus it's a bit more dramatic this way, I think, and you should know by now I like misery and dramaaaa. XD_

* * *

Sokka is dreaming again. Toph can sense him dreaming from quite a distance away; from the sheer amount of disturbance he's creating as he rolls around in his sleep, this isn't a happy, cloudy kind of dream, but something far more... visceral, yet Sokka himself is oddly silent. There's no crying out in his sleep, no screams, and the lack of noise is, for lack of a better word, creepy. She sighs, both for her own lack of sleep and because she does actually care. A little, tiny bit, under many layers of cynicism and general apathy with the world, or so she tries to fool herself.

To prove how little she actually cares, she rolls over and tries to go back to sleep, but, well, all the tiny vibrations in the earth just won't let her. Obviously, the only solution towards getting any sleep at all tonight is to make Sokka stop dreaming. And it isn't at all because it doesn't sound like the sort of nightmare a teenage boy should be capable of having, it's just so she can close her eyes and get some sleep. Any other reason would mean that Toph is getting soft, and Toph does not do nice, she tells herself in her head.

So she stands up and wanders over to the sleeping Sokka, and it's a measure of how far his nightmare has dragged him down and trapped him in his own personal hell that he doesn't even wake up until she's leaning over him, debating whether to shake him or just yell at him and maybe wake up Aang and Katara too.

When he wakes up, though, he wakes up in a hurry. Toph barely has time to put an arm between her face and Sokka's fist, as the nightmare blends with reality and he sees an enemy looming above him for a brief moment and tries, desperately, to fight it off in the second between the body waking up and the mind following.

When he does realise that it's not, in fact, whatever horror his dream produced, but a real, very irate Toph he's just hit, the look of sheer guilt (and maybe a little fear; Toph is scary when she's angry) on his face shouldn't actually be possible for one person, but Sokka manages it. Toph gives him a slightly pained expression, and then gestures, away from the sleeping people, towards the edge of tonight's clearing.

Before she can even start to talk, Sokka is mumbling some kind of apology; Toph gives it a couple of seconds, but he's not explaining. He's just using the same basic apology over and over again in slightly different phrasing each time. Toph waits for him to run out of ways to say he didn't mean to hit her, and then informs him that really, it's not like he could ever hurt her, so all this apologising is quite unnecessary. It's a bit of a lie; her arm genuinely does hurt, but not in a way that suggests any long-lasting damage, so it's only half the truth, right? And his shaking and guilty twitching slows down a little, too, so she reckons it probably helped, just a little. He's not looking in her direction, though, so she orders him to start walking and indicates a way through the trees around them. Maybe a little exhaustion will get it out of his system.

An hour later, it seems to have worked. Sokka is noticeably less shaken, as he usually is after these walks. It doesn't feel like the sun's risen yet because Toph can't feel its heat on her skin; the birds, however, have started to squawk, which suggests that it's probably just starting to get lighter, and light of any kind seems to calm Sokka down too. On the other hand, Toph is only a little calmer, but a lot more tired, and pretty much ready to pass out.

They stop, just under the trees surrounding the campsite. Toph's expecting the usual complete silence, so it's a bit of a surprise when instead, Sokka tells her what he dreamt last night, in one long monotone sentence. About the darkness in his dreams, how even though he couldn't see or hear anyone he knew he wasn't alone. About how he knew it couldn't be Aang or Katara or Toph because in the dream, he knew they wouldn't come for him. About how the wall collapsed in around him and a shape that looked like Toph but smiled like a hungry predator laughed as the walls bent themselves around him, trapping him in the dark, unable to move or scream as the figue got closer and closer and closer. About how when he woke up and Toph was leaning over him he thought he was still dreaming.

And then he thanks her. For being there, he says, without being too much there.

This is entirely enough sentiment (if understandable; Katara's been hanging over him pretty much constantly all day every day for the last few weeks) for Toph, so she hits him gently, and suggests that if he is that grateful, maybe he can let her get some sleep now? She smiles, to soften the sentence. She thinks, maybe, just maybe, he starts to smile back a little, before he walks away without another word.

And if the sleep they both get isn't very long, it seems to be peaceful for both of them.


	4. Taken

_Hah. It's unfortunately not dead yet! This is basically a throwaway sentence from the first chapter expanded; yup, that does mean, time-line-wise, this comes before any other chapter. Enjoy? I think there's 2 more chapters in this, somewhere, they're just proving a little harder to write than I thought. Pointless fluff or Zuko next, I wonder?_

_Disclaimer goes here - no profit, no ownership, just having fun._

* * *

They've been travelling a while when Aang excitedly tries to point out something ahead to Toph; it takes more than one sarcastic comment on the fruitlessness of pointing at something for a blind girl before he gets the message and describes the scene. Nestled between two hills is a town, although there's a brief good-humoured argument between Aang and Sokka over whether it's actually big enough to qualify for being a town or if it's just a big village. Still, Sokka doesn't think it's a good idea to go in. It's too small, too isolated, and not on a major travelling route are his arguments. The group will stand out like a sore thumb.

Katara is having none of it, though. They need supplies, and besides, there's no signs of soldiers in the area. There's another argument, this one less humorous, between the equally stubborn siblings. It takes Toph to tip the balance; Aang, as always, is happy to follow Katara. They will go to the town; Sokka can stay here or go with them, but the rest of them have decided.

And truly, at first, it all seems to be going fine. It's market day, after all, so whilst strangers raise eyebrows, the townspeople and outlying farmers are politely willing to trade. There's even a food stall with benches, so they get to sit down for their first meal in a while. Sokka is still moody, which Toph attributes to being outvoted, and given how at one point Katara pointedly tells him to stop sulking and behave, Toph assumes it's vsible on his face as well.

After they eat, Katara seems to revel in winding Sokka up; when he insists they leave, now, Katara is equally insistent that she is not done shopping yet and wanders off, Aang in tow. Toph is left with a Sokka so tense and frustrated, she can't avoid picking it up through the earth, making her equally jumpy and a whole lot more sarcastic. They end up silent, each wrapped in their own bubble of misery, leant against a wall at the edge of the market, until Sokka spots something. Pushing their way through the now bustling market, posters in hand, are a group of very loud Fire Nation soldiers. Most of the market folk seem to want nothing to do with them, but a couple... a couple of the traders seem to be willing to talk. With each trader, the soldiers get rowdier, talking loudly about the reward involved in capturing the Avatar. Sokka has tensed up even further, reaching for his boomerang, when he swears and, strangely, relaxes. Under his breath, he tells Toph that if they fight here, an awful lot of people will be injured, and that Toph needs to find the others and get away. He pushes her sideways, and makes sure she takes the first couple of steps before he steps forwards. Toph hesitates, for a moment, but she can feel how cramped it would be to fight here, and so she does as she's told, although she wants to argue. As she runs, behind her she can hear Sokka being as obnoxious as he knows how, which is rather impressive, really. For a moment, the soldier's attention is focussed, giving her precious time. To linger will waste the effort Sokka is making.

Toph leaves him there alone, even as her conscience screams at her not to go. It keeps screaming all through that day and long into the evening, when it becomes obvious that Sokka is gone and they do not know where.

That night, Toph finds it hard to sleep.


End file.
